HOW DO YOU WRITE?

What leads you down this path? When does the desire to write start?

For me it was walking into a first grade classroom smelling of crayons and books. We started writing with those fat red pencils.

Remember how thirilling it was to move to skinny pencils? It hit me then. I wanted to be a writer. That first 'blue book', reports for class and being allowed to use ink, fed the urge, but my big loopy script took too many pages.

My first day in high school typing class was a dream. I ran from the bus, dashed through the house to my room, and pulled the typewriter case out of my closet. Finally! With a joy that should have been reserved for things that really mattered, I hugged that Royal portable and breathed in the scent of ink! Now! Now I could write.

Sadly, my skills on the manual typewriter were not good. I fell in love with the electric typewriters in class. It took years, but when I started teaching, I purchased an electric portable. And then demands on my time, preparing for classes took all my typing efforts. My dream of writing looked a little dimmer...but I held on.

My home economics classes in middle school morfed into career explorations classes...gulp. But the pain eased when a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer appeared in my career class. Disappointment in this boxy machine soon turned to excitement when Apple II E computers arrived. Hope stirred. And then the grand machine, the Apple II GS arrived.

This was it! This cute little computer with the tiny keyboard was my dream machine. It was so much more aesthetically pleasing than the previous computers. My excitement grew.

So, I retyped my first manuscript over again to the Apple II GS and saved it to a five inch floppy disk. [named it 'test' so my ten and twelve yr. old sons wouldn't look] My heart sang. I was on my way.

Then the Tandy 1000 arrived. WOW! The Tandy computer was faster, had fewer quirks. My first PC...I loved it! [guilty feelings for cheating on my lovely II GS sitting at home...] So, once again, come summer break, I retyped my manuscript into a new format. It was tedious, but I was writing. And I added a few pages each time I switched machines.

Much has changed since I retyped that one manuscript over and over, again. Many computers have come and gone in our house. I've toyed with the Alpha Smart, a PDA with keyboard, and laptop computers. Each time I discover new technology, I push forward a few more pages, a few more words, even a few more finished manuscripts...[thirteen now]

What about you? How do you write? Do you stick to longhand to create your masterpieces? Do you use a typewriter? A word processor? A computer?

Share your writing voyage with us...and happy writing.